UFO 50 Retrospective Part 1 - Barbuta

I’ll begin my review of Barbuta by telling a story. I was showing UFO 50 to my girlfriend Amethyst, and showing her some games. “Oh this is a platformer” “It’s a cute arcadey game I like”. Then I got to this game, and said “Please tell me what you think this game is, in the next 5 seconds”. I then walked to the right, stepped on a nearly invisible switch, and got killed immediately by a falling block. Excitedly, she went “Oh, it’s a Mulana!”

Barbuta is the first game in UFO 50, a collection of 50 games inspired by the 80s. And as I explained in the Primer, which if you haven’t seen you should consider looking at, all 50 games are based on vibes and energies and designs of the 80s, and are from an alternate universe where this company, UFO Soft, made these games. In this case however, it’s not QUITE a UFO Soft game.

In the 80s, Thorson Petters worked at a company named LX Systems. LX Systems, which stands for Luxury Systems, made a micro PC and produced business software for it. Which y’know, is what most micro PCs did. The company was three men. Thorson Petters, Benedikt Chun, and Gerry Smolski. Chun and Smolski were family friends who worked at a printing company years ago that made a game, but that’s not what they were here for, their computer was specifically for business software. And they hired Thorson to make that software. Well turns out, business software is fucking boring, and so he was working on a side project for the computer as a hobby. Uh, on company time. When his bosses found out about it, they almost fired him… until they played it. It wasn’t meant to be a huge success. It wasn’t meant to make money, even. It was an art project, if anything. And that’s what Thorson Petters is. Our first character in the story of UFO Soft, Thorson is our artist. The weirdo. His stuff he makes is challenging, weird, and EXTREMELY interesting. Like this game.

Inspired by early 80s microPC games, this game feels EXTREMELY British, in a game no other game feels like in UFO 50. You play as a little knight in a Barbute helmet, exploring a big castle. There’s no explanation. No story. Not even a title screen. It’s you and a castle. There are some NPCs, blobs, who will give you a few hints, but you need to explore and solve the puzzles yourself. And this is a very, VERY janky puzzle platformer. You move slow as shit, have a dinky short range sword, there’s no music, you die in one hit and have 6 lives, represented by eggs that you then hatch out of. Note those eggs for later, mind you.

Puzzles can range from “oh okay”, like striking blocks that look cracked to reveal a secret passage, to “ohhh god dammit, okay”, where after you find the solution it makes to perfect sense, to complete bullshit stuff I found COMPLETELY by accident. It’s not unfun to explore or play, but it is for sickos. This game is a sickos game. If you like La-Mulana, Maze of Galious, or any of those old ZX spectrum games, you’ll enjoy this one.

I should explain that each game has three things you can do. 1) You can get the Garden unlockable. This is usally a halfway point kinda thing, which gives a little item for a tomagachi game. Next is golding it, this is usually just beating the game. Then there’s cherrying it, which is like 100% usually, or beating it with an additional qualifier. In this case, Cherrying it is exploring half the rooms, beating it is beating the final boss, and cherrying it is beating it with full eggs. It’s not AS hard as it seems, but it is a tough some of a bitch for the uninitiated. But when you do succeed, when you figure it out, ooooh there’s no better feeling. But it is EXTREMELY not for everyone, you have been warned.

It’s also important to note that it is SO not for everyone, that I’ve heard stories of people buying this pack of games, playing Barbuta cause it’s the first game in the collection, and then refunding the entire thing. Very stupid, but I’m not surprised.

7.5/10